Friday, January 01, 2010
American bureaucracies, Part III
David Brooks thinks it’s about American expectations toward bureaucracies, not necessarily the performance of bureaucracies:
David Brooks thinks it’s about American expectations toward bureaucracies, not necessarily the performance of bureaucracies:
For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.Update -- I feel more than a little bad indirectly referring to the seven killed in Afghanistan as bureaucrats. The station chief, BTW, was the mother of three children. They all died for their country.
